Free Press Staff Writer

If you go

ChampFest at ECHO, an annual observance of Lake Champlain’s legendary sea-monster, runs through Sunday. For a schedule of events, visit www.echovermont.org or call 864-1848.

If you must know

Dozens of lake-watchers over the decades believe they’ve seen our lake monster, Champ. Despite testimony, photographs and video, noted science writer Joe Nickell judges those accounts to be pure hooey. In the July/August 2003 issue of Skeptical Inquiry, Nickell wrote that Champ believers “engage in the logical fallacy called arguing from ignorance: ‘We don’t know what these people saw; therefore, it must have been Champ.’” Nickell concludes: “One cannot draw a conclusion from a lack of knowledge, and so, until an actual specimen presents itself, the possibility that any large, unknown animal inhabits Lake Champlain remains somewhere between extraordinarily slim and none.” Skeptical Inquirer, online at http://bit.ly/ChampCSI

Consider the duck-billed platypus, advises Bill Elliston, the public education manager at the ECHO Lake Aquarium and Science Center in Burlington.

“For years, no one believed it was real,” he said. “Everyone thought it was a hoax, right?”

That line of reasoning, along with the sort that demands harder proof, frame ChampFest: ECHO’s weeklong celebration of what hundreds of people allege is Lake Champlain’s largest living leviathan.

The center cast its nets wide. Champ’s shadow, after all, looms in cross-your-heart testimony, amateur photography and in the fuzzy green costume of a mascot for the minor league baseball Lake Monsters.

Believers proclaimed their faith in the real thing with much fist-pumping Monday during a presentation by education intern Connor Gallagher. Others in the divided, mostly young audience stroked imaginary beards, on cue, intoning, “I’m not so sure.”

Gallagher provided fodder for both camps:

• The deep-sea giant squid, feared and dismissed as a sailors’ legend for centuries, finally surfaced as the real deal, didn’t it?

• The lack of disruptions to any identifiable food chain, the absence of a fossil record — how much should we bank on these criteria furnished by established biologists?

• The Champ-like sturgeon spotted in 1609 by the keen-sighted explorer Samuel de Champlain was, by his own reckoning, about 5 feet long. But, the Frenchman noted in his journals, the natives had seen those far, far bigger.

“Bring us your stories,” Gallagher urged the youngsters. “See what you find.”

After his presentation, much of his audience lined up at the button-making machine.

Mae Hanbridge, 10, of Springfield opted for the “Believer!” button, and colored the Champ on it green.

An unscientific poll suggested that plenty of other folks had chosen the “Skeptic” button, with its authoritative, silhouette evocative of Sherlock Holmes with a magnifying glass.

Champ, in some way or another, always has been part of ECHO’s “curriculum,” said center spokeswoman Gerianne Smart.

Perhaps the single most compelling photograph of the beast, one snapped by Sandra Mansi in 1977, is now in ECHO’s collection — and is a subject of a short film during ChampFest.

At its most serious, ChampFest celebrates cryptozoology, the mostly respectable science of seeking out creatures that are so chronically shy as to cast doubts on their existence.